You can chomp every element in the array when you slurp the file: chomp(@stopwords = <FILE>);(As a side note, in general, chomp is preferable to chop.)

The \b says to look for a word boundary. In other words, if your target string is part of another word, the \b will keep it from matching.

my $target = "another";
$target =~ /other/;       # this matches
$target =~ /\bother/;     # this doesn't
[download]

You can read more about it in the perlre document.